EDMONTON – A University of Alberta pro-life group says its right to freedom of expression has been violated by the imposition of a $17,500 security fee to stage events on campus.

Lawyers for UAlberta Pro-Life argued its case at the Alberta Court of Appeal on Nov. 28. The justices have reserved their decision.

Lawyer Jay Cameron told court the security fee is unjustified and unfairly targets UAlberta Pro-Life however “uncomfortable, disagreeable and unpopular” its views may be to others.

The case stems from an approved UAlberta Pro-Life event held in 2015 which encountered a protest from some University of Alberta students. The protesters attempted to obstruct the event by covering graphic images of aborted fetuses in the pro-life display.

UAlberta Pro-life filed a complaint with the U of A but, after an investigation, the university did not proceed with the complaint. A year later, UAlberta Pro Life asked permission to stage a similar event. The university agreed but attached a $17,500 fee to cover campus security costs.

Unable to afford the fee, the event was cancelled, said Amberlee Nicol, former president of UAlberta Pro-life, who has since graduated.

Nicol, a member of the pro-life National Campus Life Network, said the fee has had a chilling effect, which is why the group has taken its case to the province’s top court.

“My hope is that things go well and our group, as well as other groups that may be afraid to speak out, will be able to express their views peacefully and openly without being worried that someone else’s offence or someone else’s rule-breaking will take away their right to express themselves freely,” Nicol said outside court.

“What did the appellants do wrong?” Cameron asked the court. “They obtained permission. They maintained reasonable composure despite the fact they were in front of protesters. You don’t have to agree with my client but they have a legitimate right to recognition by the university.”

Matthew Woodley, representing the University of Alberta, noted that the university has never deniedUAlberta Pro-Life permission to hold events. The U of A even released a statement at the time supporting the group’s right to free expression, he said.

Woodley said the university followed procedure when it consulted with campus security and determined the need for extra security, resulting in costs that must be borne by student groups hosting an extra-curricular event, not the university.

“The dean of students balanced the expression of views with the financial and security needs of the university,” Woodley said, noting that UAlberta Pro-Life wanted to have a large-scale, two-day event on campus. “The ideal comes with the requirement to pay the actual cost of it.”

Cameron said the U of A acted in bad faith when it failed to pursue a complaint by UAlberta Pro-Life against the counter-protesters, and instead imposed the security fee. He said that although the views of UAlberta Pro-Life may be unpopular, they still deserve unfettered recognition on campus and there is “no more appropriate place” to have the free flow of ideas and viewpoints.

“It’s essential that we maintain that atmosphere,” Cameron said.

The B.C. Civil Liberties Association, which was granted intervenor status in the case, says charging a security fee of any amount is an infringement of the right to free expression.

“We don’t think the University of Alberta is trying to suppress a pro-life message,” said Nate Whitling, the Edmonton lawyer representing the B.C. Civil Liberties Association. However, “the security costs prohibit the event from occurring. It’s the imposition of any fee that we object to.”

Whitling noted that the B.C. Civil Liberties Association is a pro-choice group.

Nevertheless, in this case, Whitling said the U of A — acting as a government entity in this situation by providing post-secondary education — should apply any type of security fee fairly.

“If you pick and choose, then you’re suppressing ideas which are controversial. The effect is to trample out controversial ideas and dissent,” Whitling told court. “Government entities have the right to raise revenue as long as they do it in a content-neutral manner.”

Unlike many other news websites, The Catholic Register has never charged readers for access to the news and information on our site. We want to keep our award-winning journalism as widely available as possible. But we need your help.

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Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced the province was suspending plans to expand existing French community college and bilingual university programs into a French-language university. The government claims the cut will help it reduce a $15-billion deficit.

The Assembly of Francophone Ontarians launched the #LaResistance hashtag on Twitter and has called for protests across the province.

Ontario Francophones are right to be outraged at the decision to halt the university planning process, Ottawa Archbishop Terrence Prendergasttold The Catholic Register in an email.

“The way the decision was announced sent a signal that the services Franco-Ontarians could rightfully demand or count on were being downgraded,” Prendergast wrote.

Existing bilingual programs at the University of Ottawa, the University of Sudbury and Saint Paul University are “linguistically incomplete,” forcing students to take some courses in English to complete their degrees, said Prendergast.

“There is a great risk of assimilation to the dominant English-language culture if they cannot pursue higher studies beyond the secondary level,” he said.

The move punishes Ontario’s most successful school system by devaluing its high school diplomas, Lemay said.

“These students who study in French from early ages right through high school must have a choice in the university they want to choose from,” he said. “We are really stifled by the fact that the Ontario government told us, ‘No, you can’t have that.’ ”

The provincial government has not yet said how much money the decision will save, but Francophone Affairs Minister Caroline Mulroney was quoted saying she would “continue to be a tireless advocate for the university, by and for francophones, so that when we are in a position to proceed with the build, we will be ready to go.”

During the spring election campaign Ford promised to continue the planning process for the French-language university begun by the previous Liberal government. Mulroney had repeated the promise in several meetings with francophone organizations.

With 75 per cent of Ontario’s 105,000 French language students, Ontario’s eight French Catholic boards boast a 93-per-cent graduation rate and the highest scores among Ontario’s four public education systems on standardized tests.

Lemay sees a direct parallel between the French-language university decision and the 1912-13 Regulation 17, which tried to undermine Catholic education rights by banning French-language instruction in Ontario schools.

“It is the same approach that they’ve used to do this. They are stopping us from getting a proper education at the university level. I think they’re attacking our culture. They’re really attacking our culture right now, specifically the French Catholic.”

An attack on French-language rights should worry all Catholics who value their education rights, Lemay said. Treating French as an unaffordable frill is just a small step away from arguments for banning Catholic education in favour of a single, secular system, he said.

According to Statistics Canada there were 622,415 francophones in Ontario at the last census in 2016.

Franco-Ontarian Conservative MPP Amanda Simard has publicly criticized her own government’s decision to stop the university planning process and cut the province’s French-language services commissioner.

Over three days The Catholic Register asked spokespeople for the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities, the Office for Francophone Affairs and the Premier’s Office for comment. There was no reply at press time.

Support The Catholic Register

Unlike many other news websites, The Catholic Register has never charged readers for access to the news and information on our site. We want to keep our award-winning journalism as widely available as possible. But we need your help.

For more than 125 years, The Register has been a trusted source of faith based journalism. By making even a small donation you help ensure our future as an important voice in the Catholic Church. If you support the mission of Catholic journalism, please donate today. Thank you.

]]>mikes@catholicregister.org (Michael Swan, The Catholic Register)CanadaThu, 29 Nov 2018 14:28:38 -0500King’s University College doubles down on its futurehttps://www.catholicregister.org/features/item/28417-king-s-university-college-doubles-down-on-its-future
https://www.catholicregister.org/features/item/28417-king-s-university-college-doubles-down-on-its-future

King’s University College has taken a big step into its own future by doubling the size of its campus footprint.

The Catholic college affiliated with Western University in London, Ont., has bought an 18.152-acre plot of land from the Diocese of London. The transfer was marked by an Oct. 29 celebration on the property which fronts St. Peter’s Seminary adjacent to the college.

“That land is our land and it has opened up the future for us and has provided us with all kinds of options down the road,” said Dr. Sauro Camiletti, King’s Interim Principal and Academic Dean.

The purchase price has not been released, but Camiletti said the funds will come from the new Imagine the Future fundraising campaign launched by the King’s University College Foundation. The goal is to raise $15 million to offset the purchase price, fund scholarships and other student supports.

The campaign is off to a fine start as the student council has already committed $5 million and the Alumni Association has pledged another $300,000.

The diocese will also transfer another 15 acres of land to neighbouring St. Peter’s Seminary, including the seminary building. In a statement, Bishop Ronald Fabbro said the transfer will continue the vision of his predecessors, Bishop Michael Fallon in particular, in their aim to create “a hub of Catholic learning and formation in Southwestern Ontario.”

Camiletti said the land purchase protects King’s and ensures its viability in the future.

“If you don’t acquire the land then another party will and that party may be a commercial agent or a residential development, all kinds of things that could threaten the mission of the college and severely restrict our ability to expand,” he said.

King’s is home to about 3,600 students with more than 400 full and part-time faculty. There are no concrete plans to expand the campus just yet, said Camiletti, but a university is a place that is always evolving and developing new programs. The new land gives the school some breathing room for the future, as well as continuing to meet the needs of today’s students.

“What new land does for us is it gives us the opportunity to design space that serves the kinds of functions that are more current and the ones we’ll need in the future,” he said.

Camiletti expects the new property will eventually house new academic buildings, space for student activities and continued greenspace, as well as being a welcoming place for its neighbours.

“That whole process of developing that land will take a great deal of time,” he said.

King’s was founded in 1954 under the name Christ the King College and was owned and governed by the diocese until 1972 when the college took responsibility for the overall operation and guidance. It was incorporated as a separate entity in 2013.

These are the words Maggie McAuley uses to describe the discrimination she faced as a pro-life student on campus at the University of Windsor, Ont.

“A man asked me if I would have an abortion if he raped me. Afterwards, he put a photo of an aborted baby in my mailbox with a single line: ‘your baby after I rape you,’” she said on a video released by National Campus Life Network last month.

“I was terrified to even leave my house.”

McAuley shared her story on a video released 11 days after the Ontario government announced in August that all publicly-funded universities and colleges must have a free speech policy in place by Jan. 1, 2019. The policies would apply to faculty, students, staff, management and guests.

“Universities and colleges should be places for open discussion and free inquiry. The university/college should not attempt to shield students from ideas or opinions they disagree with or find offensive,” says the document.

According to McAuley, the policy is a nice idea, but does not go nearly far enough.

“The problem is a lot of universities already have policies of freedom of speech. Windsor does,” she told The B.C. Catholic. “It’s like putting a small Band-Aid on a split-open head. It’s a gesture. It acknowledges the problem, which is good, but it’s not going to fix it.”

In her mind, the only way to truly protect the free speech rights of university students would be a winning court case in favour of those who feel discriminated.

According to the National Campus Life Network, it’s a much larger issue than many people realize.

Executive director Ruth Shaw said while McAuley’s story is the “most extreme” she’s heard in the last 10 years, the various components of her story — facing threats of arrest, being spat upon and watching pro-life displays trashed — happen often and across the country.

“Every one of those individual things has happened repeatedly on Canadian campuses” and has “ramped up significantly” in recent years, she said.

While Shaw said thepolicy is “a good first step,” she added that it doesn’t do enough to protect students. For example, it stays silent about student unions.

“Student unions are bastions of discrimination in Canada. They are not bound by their own administration, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms or Canadian law,” said Shaw. “Who are they accountable to? Seemingly nobody.”

]]>CanadaMon, 22 Oct 2018 16:27:05 -0400Vancouver teachers get to the Core of their faithhttps://www.catholicregister.org/features/item/28255-vancouver-teachers-get-to-the-core-of-their-faith
https://www.catholicregister.org/features/item/28255-vancouver-teachers-get-to-the-core-of-their-faith

VANCOUVER – Vancouver College religion teacher Greg Van Dyk is always looking for new ways to teach the faith. So when he took a course at St. Mark’s College that compared mortal and venial sin to a broken bone versus a fracture, he knew he had something he could use.

Van Dyk was one of eight graduates from St. Mark’s Collegewho are proving religion class isn’t just for religion teachers.

The Catholic school teachers have completed the college’s brand-new Catholic Core program, focusing on the “core” of Church theology, Scripture, and morality.

“I could not pass up the opportunity,” said Tracy Palitti, a kindergarten teacher at Our Lady of Good Counsel School.

She said the course on Scripture gave her more material to use in her own classroom, while the theology and morality lessons helped answer questions about her own faith.

“I feel that after taking the Core, one can have a deeper love and appreciation for the faith,” and become more involved in religious formation of students, she said.

She and the seven other graduates attended part-time classes at St. Mark’s over the span of one year to complete the program. While not a certificate or diploma, the courses can be applied for credit toward other programs at St. Mark’s. Palitti went on to apply for the Graduate Certificate in Catholic Educational Leadership.

Also completing the Core program was Vancouver College’s Van Dyk.

“I love learning more about my faith, and I want to be able to go deeper when students ask good questions,” he said.

He found the course in morality gave him some ideas to use this fall when he starts teaching at St. Andrew’s Regional High School in Victoria.

“I found myself noticing lots of analogies and explanations from my graduate level textbook that I knew would totally make sense to my classroom full of teenage boys.” For example, the class discussed comparing “venial and mortal sin to sports injuries — one just fractures the bone, while the other breaks it,” he said. “This is something my students would get.”

When it comes down to it, Van Dyk said it’s the ways he grew personally, not the tips he jotted down for future lesson plans, that made the program especially worth it.

“Beyond increasing our knowledge about Catholicism, as Catholic teachers we should be looking to further our personal knowledge of Jesus in our own lives,” he said.

“It’s important to remember that academic study really only exists to serve what should be a real and living relationship” with Christ.

Archbishop J. Michael Miller, CSB, has high praise for the Catholic Core program and the importance of continuing education for Catholic teachers. In fact, he launched the Archbishop’s scholarship that pays for the tuition of CISVA teachers looking to expand their knowledge through the program.

St. Mark’s College has since opened up the program to education assistants as well as teachers, and said at least another eight are on track to complete Catholic Core by the spring of 2019.

When we speak of Catholic education it is almost a cliché to begin by saying that universities were born from the Church and to give Bologna and Oxford as examples of the foundational role the Church played in the development of higher education.

It is, of course, both an accurate record of historical origins but also an obvious attempt to validate the Catholic lineage of universities in an age of secularization.

The next invocation is Cardinal John Henry Newman’s dated but still remarkably influential The Idea of the University, a treatise that argued for the value of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and a work that simultaneously warned of the dangers of narrow specializations and the importance of separation between Church and school. Again, one can see why this text resonates for most champions of Catholic education.

A great number of Catholic colleges and universities, both in Canada and throughout the world, are liberal arts-based, and so any work that intelligently makes the case for a comprehensive understanding of knowledge that provides students with what Newman called a “clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things,” will strike an important note for those wishing to support the liberal arts model of education at a time when these values are clearly under attack.

It is not unusual, therefore, to find mission statements from most of our institutions that speak of our commitment to serving students in a way that is arguably unique to the Catholic intellectual tradition.

It is a tradition intent on producing citizens of the real world who are well-rounded, academically rigorous, fully formed in mind, body and spirit, and keen to give back to society.

The reality is that Catholic higher education in Canada and around the world is booming. Far from a marginalized space under siege by secularization, Catholic universities and colleges have carved out important niches in society to deliver the very highest standard of education within a model of care and ethical behaviour that is second to none.

The Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities in Canada represents 22 such institutions that span the length of the country. All of these institutions, small and large, pride themselves on presenting a values-based education that reminds its stakeholders — our students — that their success will be measured more by what they give back to society than by what they gain personally through their accomplishments.

Given this mandate to model dynamic and responsible citizenry, it is not surprising to find Catholic colleges and universities championing key social issues, from access to education for the disadvantaged to shaping the response to Indigenous reconciliation.

At St. Mary’s University in Calgary, for example, we have pioneered an award-winning program that has opened doors to further educational opportunities, and that is provided free of charge, to the city’s most marginalized citizens. The Humanities 101 program has allowed countless students — recovered addicts, migrants, vulnerable populations — to re-enter the workforce or pursue higher educational programs.

This work is being undertaken from the heart of Catholic post-secondary institutions because we recognize that places of learning must help to illuminate the path to healing.

In his inaugural speech as the new president of St. Michael’s College in Toronto earlier this month, David Sylvester reminded the assembled that a university — especially a Catholic university — “requires a recommitment to our historical strengths: the uncompromising search for the truth in all things; the pursuit of excellence in our teaching and research; the nurturing of a campus that is marked by diversity, inclusiveness and justice; the courage to listen to and serve the marginalized and voiceless; and the honesty required to recognize when we must change.”

Pope Francis, in similar fashion, noted that Catholic universities, “by their very nature, are committed to demonstrating the harmony of faith and reason and the relevance of the Christian message for a full and authentically human life.”

Surely that is the objective of any Catholic post-secondary institution.

Going to university often means leaving home and friends behind, but it doesn’t have to mean parting ways with your Catholic faith.

The introduction of an online service last year is making it easier for students to join a new Catholic family on campus.

Chaplaincy Connect is an online sign-up from the Office of Catholic Youth (OCY) to connect students with their Catholic chaplaincies on campus. Students can enter the post-secondary institution they are attending and immediately get in touch with a community that will support them in their faith.

Cameron Beare is the campus leader for the Catholic Christian Outreach chaplaincy at University of Ottawa. He said students can sometimes get lost at university and it’s important that a campus ministry becomes a Catholic family for young people.

“It really shows what potential there is to help people stop getting lost at university,” he said. “Everyone that’s come through Chaplaincy Connect, they’ve been people who have signed up, who are interested and have stuck around.”

OCY campus minister Eliza Trotter said too often Catholic chaplaincy is a hidden ministry on campus. When high school students graduate from Catholic school and leave their home parish youth groups, it is important that the Church is still present and ready to accompany them in their next stage of life.

“I think there was this sense that it’s really important that we try to provide something for them at that stage in their lives which is so critical,” said Trotter. “They’re maturing in so many ways and making very important life decisions…. And our faith gives answers to so many of those questions.”

The idea for the website — ChaplaincyConnect.ca— came from a Google Form created by Erin Kinsella, the associate director of campus outreach at University of Toronto’s Newman Centre.

“Partially, it was inspired by the stats of students who no longer practised their faith once they leave university and it’s just not acceptable that that’s happening,” she said.

A recent study commissioned by the Christian ministry organization Power to Change examined young adult’s transitional relationship with the Church of Today. “Renegotiating Faith,” which was published on Oct. 9, consulted young adult ministry experts from Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox communities across the country.

Data showed that young adults who had a home church mentor recommend a campus group connection are three times more likely (68 per cent) to join the campus group compared to those (23 per cent) who had no help.

Before Chaplaincy Connect, youth ministry leaders across the archdiocese of Toronto often reached out to Kinsella for contact recommendations for their students. Last year, she brought the idea of connecting youth ministers to campus leaders to the Canadian Catholic Campus Ministry network. That in turn led to the creation of a national form to connect chaplaincies across the nation. OCY launched a central website in spring 2017.

“If a student completes a form, their information goes automatically to the e-mail inbox of the campus minister at their chosen (post-secondary) institution,” said Kinsella. “The point is to get them connected to a real person and making that real connection at their destination campus.”

It is important, Kinsella said, that Chaplaincy Connect uses a low-commitment invitation. Chaplaincy Connect outlines specific protocols for follow-ups, depending on the level of interest the student expressed in the form.

“It’s not a commitment. It’s just an opportunity to get connected and it takes out the fear for them of stepping into a new community,” she said.

Andrew Chater understands he is going where no Brescia University College faculty has ever gone before, and it’s a challenge he is welcoming.

Chater said it is good to have a healthy amount of pressure, and it is sure to come as he joins 18 other Canadian academics in this year’s crop of Fulbright scholars. The prestigious Fulbright program allows exceptional Canadian scholars to research and lecture in American universities on issues that are of importance to that school.

Chater’s PhD dissertation, completed in 2015, was on international relations in the Arctic and focused on the Arctic Council, what he calls “a United Nations of the Arctic.” It’s an international institution that brings together all the Arctic nations — Canada, the U.S., Russia and the Scandinavian countries — with a focus on environmental protection issues. Where the Arctic Council differs from other such institutions is in Indigenous involvement. Indigenous peoples’ organizations have a form of membership, said Chater, with a right to attend all the meetings, participate in discussion and sponsor projects, “basically everything a state can do except they can’t vote on council decisions.”

“This is a unique model of participation, a unique model of membership… and I want to study more how this manifests into results,” he said.

While there is no Indigenous vote on council matters, there is no doubt that the voice of the six Indigenous advocacy organizations on the council is heard on matters — as a voice of the people rather than a voice for a nation. Chater said understanding what participation or membership means for Indigenous in institutions is a profound question in a time of reconciliation.

“It’s a good model and one of the things I want to look at in the research is how transposable it is if other institutions can adopt something similar,” said Chater, who teaches political science at the Catholic liberal arts university for women on the Western University campus in London, Ont.

The Fulbright program’s goal is to improve intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy and intercultural competence between Americans and other nations through the exchange of persons, knowledge and skills. It was founded in 1946 by U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright and is widely considered among the most prized scholarships in the world. Established in the wake of the Second World War, it was an attempt to promote peace and understanding through educational exchange. Fifty-nine alumni have won Nobel Prizes and another 82 have won Pulitzer Prizes.

Chater understands what an honour it is personally and how much it will mean to his area of study.

“One of the nice things about the Fulbright program is it gives you the profile and it exposes you to some new voices and perspectives,” he said. “So it will make the work better.”

And Brescia, a small university on the much-larger Western campus, will also benefit. He hopes to bring the experience back to Brescia and help enhance the school’s research profile.

“It will be good to see how things are done at the University of Washington and bring back some ideas about what we do well and what we can do better at Brescia.”

For most Catholics on the greyer side of the generation divide, student politics today definitely isn’t what it used to be.

University students in London, Ont., might shut down a street for a party, as was the case earlier this month, but when was the last time they took the streets for a cause?

“It’s 50 years since ’68. It’s not yesterday,” points out University of St. Michael’s College Christianity and Culture program co-ordinator Giulio Silano. The professor of Mediaeval history isn’t nostalgic for molotov cocktails and the smell of burning tires, but he does wish he could see some spark of political passion and engagement on campus.

“They are bred for passivity from day one,” Silano said. “That’s the whole thrust of how we educate them — that they should go along to get along.”

That was never the Catholic idea of a university, he said.

“Universities arose exactly as a place where people could sit down for awhile and think about whatever they inherited in a critical way,” said Silano. “You look at whatever your parents and grandparents and the Church are handing you. And then you say, ‘Are there problems with this? What do I make of it?’ If you can’t assess it, it doesn’t live. It dies.”

Silano’s vision is in line with the thoughts of Cardinal John Henry Newman.

“If then a practical end must be assigned to a university course, I say it is that of training good members of society,” Newman wrote in The Idea of a University in 1852. “It is the education which gives a man a clear, conscious view of their own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them.”

For King’s University politics, social justice and peace studies professor Shawna Lewkowitz, the last thing a Catholic university should do is accept political passivity.

“We’re educating them for the world, not just for jobs and the workforce,” she said. “We’re looking at educating them as whole people who are capable of interacting with the world we live in.”

Lewkowitz sends her students into the political arena to talk to local community leaders, identify issues, organize, analyze and debate. As Ontario municipal elections swung into high gear this fall, King’s students in the political science and social justice clubs organized an on-campus all-candidates debate.

“Seeing those students in action and hearing their questions, I would say that we’re making a difference,” Lewkowitz said.

The secret sauce in the King’s formula for turning out politically aware students is the Catholic social teaching tradition, she said.

“Educating young people is a long game,” said Lewkowitz.

Silano worries that the university can’t substitute for a genuine experience of community and mentorship.

“Both as Catholics and as citizens, that’s the real problem — the poverty of our experience of community through our education,” he said. “The parish experience is a joke. The Catholic school doesn’t work. The family is what it is. So these young people don’t tend to come (to university) with the experience of community.”

Whatever their politics — conservative, liberal or anarchist — it’s the university’s job to foster political self-awareness, said Lewkowitz. Given the state of political debate off-campus, the next generation has to be better at this, she said.

“Perhaps even more urgently now, we need students and people able to understand and engage on those issues in a way that is constructive and leads to resolution, instead of escalation,” she said.

Earlier this year, Fr. Thomas Rosica, CSB, CEO of Salt + Light Catholic Media Foundation, delivered the Carr Lecture at St. Mark’s College on the campus of the University of British Columbia. Here is an abridged version of his remarks that underscore the distinctive nature of Catholic universities.

At the beginning of the last century, Fr. Henry Carr, a great Basilian priest from Ontario, played a very key role in turning a small Catholic institution focused on preparation for the priesthood into an excellent arts college, fully federated with the University of Toronto.

Federation broke the long period of isolation from the mainstream of Canadian university life and made St. Michael’s College one of the earliest English-language Roman Catholic colleges in Canada to provide higher education in partnership with a secular institution.

While at St. Michael’s, Fr. Carr promoted excellence in Catholic higher education, bringing well-known Catholic scholars to the college and co-founding in 1929 what would become the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, a world-renowned research institute. A champion of the model of federation, Fr. Carr went on to head similar Catholic institutions at the Universities of Saskatchewan and British Columbia.

At each of these institutions, he was directly involved in their federation with the university, viewing federation as the best solution for Catholic colleges in an age of secularization. He never advocated for the stand-alone Catholic university, the dominant model in the United States. His intuition was prophetic for Catholic higher education in Canada today.

Fr. Carr embodied the charism of the Basilian Fathers in a remarkable way: the never-ending pursuit of goodness, discipline and knowledge. At the heart of his vision were two outstanding qualities so essential to our efforts in higher education: dialogue and friendship.

While the Church can offer a broad theological vision that focuses on the interconnectedness of all things, it cannot pretend to have all the answers to specific concrete questions. In these circumstances, honest debate must be encouraged that respects divergent views. This means that the Church should be included in the dialogue, but it also means other voices need to be heard.

Dialogue is the mark of a conversion away from selfish fragmentation and toward an openness that challenges us truly to understand the plight of our fellow human beings. Such dialogue cannot take place from a position of insularity but requires radical and generous openness to the other that is both born from, and leads to, a growing awareness of the interconnectedness of all things.

The second stellar quality of Fr. Henry Carr was his understanding of friendship. If Canadians representing different cultural and religious traditions are going to be engaged with one another through agreements and partnerships in education, health care and other endeavours, their leaders must be men and women who are able to create relationships around a common cause.

Fr. Carr was once quoted as saying about university federation: “Insist on your rights, and you will get what you deserve: nothing. But act as a friend, and be a friend among friends, and the most cumbersome legal machinery will roll smoothly on.”

For Fr. Carr, friendship and personal relationships were the first and proper currency of federation, and nowhere is this more evident than in Canadian confederation itself. He understood well the meaning of dialogue and the “culture of encounter” of which Pope Francis speaks so often.

Over the past five years, Pope Francis has been modelling for us Fr. Carr’s great qualities: friendship, dialogue and encounter as he teaches us how to evangelize, catechize, inspire and engage the culture around us.

In his masterful encyclical letter Laudato Si’, Pope Francis reminds us that human beings are in a state of deep fragmentation from each other and from the created order itself.

Although “we were made for love,” we find ourselves isolated from one another and from creation. He argues that all creatures are interconnected, but we cannot even see our connection with our fellow human beings.

The Pope, like Fr. Carr years ago, emphasizes dialogue as key to the moral and spiritual conversion of humankind. He argues that dialogue is rooted in an understanding that each person has an inherent dignity and worth, that we are interconnected and interdependent, and that each person has something worthwhile to say.

As Catholic pastoral ministers, educators and students, if we are going to communicate the truth of our Catholic faith to those who do not share it, or even are hostile to it, on the campus of Catholic universities, we must never forget that our faith is best revealed to them, not through preaching and moralism, but through the disciplines of the humanities, including theology, fine arts, social sciences and empirical sciences.

It is through these disciplines that we can point to the sacramental activity of God at work in our world. It is within these disciplines that the Catholic intellectual tradition comes alive and is most accessible, even to those least disposed to it. It is through these disciplines that we lay the groundwork for authentic evangelization of culture.

There is certainly a time for confronting the culture with the message of the Gospel and the Church, but such “confrontation” must be done with civility, conviction and charity. We need to show the culture and the people of our times that we’re not against them, that we have a compelling story, and that the story can change their circumstances.